SAN JOAQUIN COUNTY — Randall Saito, the institutionalized killer who escaped a Hawaiian psychiatric hospital and made it to the Central Valley before being captured this week, said in a jailhouse interview that he fled confinement in a desperate attempt to prove he could safely be out in society, and voiced surprise he made it as far as he did.

He also said his startling diagnosis of sexual sadism and necrophilia was an invention to avoid prison time.

In an interview with ABC7 that was broadcast Thursday, Saito also detailed how he was able to get onto multiple planes to leave the Hawaii State Hospital outside Honolulu, making his first mainland stop at the Mineta San Jose International Airport primarily because it was the cheapest ticket from Hawaii.

“I couldn’t believe I actually made it,” Saito told ABC7 at the San Joaquin County jail in the town of French Camp. “It was surreal.”

Saito said he used fake ID’s to get through airport security when he took a charter flight to Maui and then another flight to San Jose. He did not disclose how he got the ID’s or the $6,000 he collected that funded the flights.

During the three-day search for Saito that started Sunday evening when his disappearance was reported to authorities and when he was captured at a Stockton gas station Wednesday, Hawaiian officials revealed that Saito was romantically involved with at least three members of hospital staff at separate points of his confinement.

Saito told ABC7 that he took a cab to a motel in San Jose and tried to buy a car in the city, but after failing that he took another cab to Stockton. He apparently spent years as a teenager in the 1970s in the nearby town of Lodi.

After three days in Stockton, where he bought a cellphone at a local Walmart, his next destination was reportedly Reno, and he said he apparently convinced a cab driver to drive him there. But that driver was apparently the person who alerted the phalanx of Hawaiian, Californian, and federal authorities conducting a manhunt for Saito.

Law enforcement converged on a gas station Wednesday morning near Highway 99 and Waterloo Road, and Saito said he surrendered peacefully.

A “police officer came over to stop me, and I said ‘hey, I’m not going to fight you. I’m not going to fight you,'” Saito said. “That’s not who I am.”

Saito was acquitted of a 1979 murder by reason of insanity and was committed in 1981, two years after he was acquitted in the killing of Sandra Yamashiro. The victim was shot and repeatedly stabbed before her body was found in her car at a mall.

In 1993, a court denied Saito’s request for conditional release, saying he continued to suffer from sexual sadism and necrophilia, something Saito told ABC7 was a fiction to avoid conventional incarceration. Prosecutors objected to his release in 2000 by contending Saito “fills all the criteria of a classic serial killer.”

“Since I’ve been to the hospital,” he said of his association with necrophilia, “I told them I actually fabricated that, sorry, to get to the state hospital.”

Saito said he escaped because he didn’t feel safe at the hospital and, ironically, wanted to prove he wasn’t the public danger he was made out to be.

“They won’t give me a chance, man,” he explained. “So I decided I needed to escape and prove to them on my own that I can be out here and act appropriately. Even though I escaped to do it.”

In the aftermath of the escape, an unspecified number of employees at Hawaii State Hospital, which houses more than 300 patients in Kaneohe, will be placed on unpaid leave for 30 days, Hawaii Department of Health Director Virginia Pressler announced Wednesday. Pressler said an internal investigation indicates employees inadvertently or intentionally neglected proper notification of supervisors and proper supervision of Saito.

That finding was highlighted by the fact hospital staff called 911 to report Saito’s disappearance at about 7:30 p.m. Sunday — two hours after he arrived in San Jose and at least eight hours after he disappeared. An all-points bulletin was issued at 8:30 p.m.

Robert Salonga is a Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter covering crime and public safety for The Mercury News. A San Jose native, he attended UCLA and has a Master's degree in journalism from the University of Maryland. He previously reported in Washington, D.C., Salinas and the East Bay, and is a middling triathlete. Reach him the low-tech way at 408-920-5002.